Canadian Blasphemy Law in Context: Press, Legislative, and Public Reactions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has always outlawed blasphemy. From the earliest days of the New France period, through the era of “Upper” and “Lower” Canada, past Confederation and the eventual enactment of the original Criminal Code, and still today, blasphemy has been considered a criminal offence in the Canadian legal system. However, this prohibition, whether expressed through common law or statute, has rarely been enforced through actual prosecution. In the 117 years since the Criminal Code was enacted, its prohibition on blasphemous libel has been enforced only five times in reported cases. A study of the Criminal Code provision and these five prosecutions provides valuable information on the legal treatment of blasphemy throughout Canadian history. However, it reveals little about what the criminalization of blasphemy meant to people other than lawyers and judges. The purpose of this article is to analyze the Canadian prohibition of blasphemy in the context of what it meant historically to journalists, theologians, politicians, and activists in the first half of the Twentieth Century when the majority of prosecutions occurred. Section II of this Article provides an in depth look at Canada’s most famous blasphemy prosecution, that of Eugene Sterry in 1927. Section III of this article covers Woodsworth’s bill, the last serious attempt to decriminalize blasphemy in Canada. Section IV provides a brief look at two Quebec-based public movements that were against the perceived social evil of blasphemy: Le ligue contre le blasphème (1926); and a more informal campaign led by future Governor General Georges Vanier (1942). By examining the context surrounding the prohibition of blasphemy, this Article sheds light on how non-legal actors have understood or used the law throughout Canadian history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".